Liron comments on A note on the description complexity of physical theories - Less Wrong

19 Post author: cousin_it 09 November 2010 04:25PM

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Comment author: Liron 09 November 2010 05:57:44PM 2 points [-]

Like PaulFChistiano said, the shortest accurate program isn't particularly useful, but its predictive model is more a priori probable according to the universal / Occamian prior.

It's really hard (and uncomputable) to discover, understand, and verify the shortest program that computes a certain input->prediction mapping. But we use the "shortest equivalent program" concept to judge which human-understandable program is more a priori probable.